Elevate by Principal: A Platform for Small Business Owners

Elevate is a venture inside Principal Financial Group built to support small business owners, offering data-driven insights, expert content and community. I joined the newly formed product organization as a Senior UX Designer and moved into a UX Strategy and Research leadership role, working as Director of Design across its three product teams and in the leadership group where cross-team priorities were set.

The teams were building independently, with no shared sitemap, journey map or single source of truth. I created the platform's first structural documents: a living sitemap, customer journey documentation, and an information architecture connecting content, community and partner solutions.

An onboarding journey map in swimlanes for the business owner, client manager, marketing and automated systems.

I moved the organization away from consultant panels and hypotheticals and toward continuous interviews with actual business owners. I reoriented the onboarding process away from pure data-capture to provide customers with real value within 48 hours.

Defining Time to Value

I wrote an internal critique of Net Promoter Score and proposed behavioral alternatives. I then defined time to value as a customer metric, which leadership adopted into its reviews, and I led the selection and rollout of the experience analytics platform to sharpen gathering of both qualitative and quantitative user behavior data.

Through several shifts in overall company strategy I worked in the Product Leads Team to create an offering that truly solved business problems for the company's target audience.

A board comparing the current path to value, with its timings, against a faster proposed path.

I disentangled and developed the organization's testing framework, separating QA, user acceptance and usability testing with clear gates before production. I established design review rigor, created the first shared production timeline between design and development, and mentored designers who grew into senior roles.

A marketing site, micro landing pages, redesigned registration and onboarding, and the partner savings experience all shipped on foundations from this work. Time to value became a metric that sharpened teams' efforts across several initiatives.

Elevate by Principal homepage: Grow your business, Reach new goals.